Monday, March 17, 2014

Film Atlas (Ireland): The Butcher Boy

Country: Ireland

Title: The Butcher Boy
(1997)

12-year-old Irish lad Francis
(‘Francie’) Brady has no shortage of energy. He runs about town with his best
friend Joe Purcell, chipping ice from the local fountain, cussing out fish from
his brookside fort, watching the Cold War rage on TV and bullying the
well-to-do Nugents, namely Philip and his English-sympathetic mother. By
narrating the story in flashback, Francis is able to overlay past and present
tense commentary on his life (which interleave in delightfully confusing
repartee), revealing that despite Francie’s wretched home life under a mentally
deteriorating mother and burnt-out alcoholic father, he remains gleefully
imperturbable on the surface while girding himself about with wild
TV-and-comic-influenced fantasies within. However Francis’s hyper-extroverted
coping mechanisms are soon indistinguishable from outright psychopathy and,
goaded by Mrs. Nugent’s combination of condescension, pity and prudery, he
ransacks her house, writing “pig” on all the walls and taking a dump on her
carpet. He is packed off to a Catholic boarding school where he befriends a
shell-shocked ex-IRA gardener and starts to make progress with a patient
counselor, but is swept under the carpet and back on the street after being
molested by a priest. Back home Francie excels as an assistant butcher and
channels/vents his emotions into drinking and brawling, but being rejected by
Joe and orphaned by his negligent father pushes his over the brink. Francie is
institutionalized, but he’s too restless to stay long and is soon at large
again, violently unhinged and fixated on the idea that Mrs. Nugent is the root
of all his problems.

While The Butcher Boy might not
seem all that similar to director Neil Jordan’s better known works, The Crying
Game and Michael Collins (which were perhaps the more obvious films to write
about), it shares his overarching interests in identity and politics. These
thematic concerns cause the film to deviate from typical evil-child-runs-amuck
thrillers both in terms of Francie’s unnerving yet understandable psychoses and
its larger implications within the context of mid-Century Ireland. Francis,
despite unrepentantly committing acts usually unforgivable for a protagonist,
still manages moments of unexpected sympathy like when he catches his mother
about to commit suicide and gently defuses the situation or when he is snubbed
by Joe, unable to see that he’s projected an imaginary friend onto a real
person who has long since moved on. There are moments of almost heart-breaking
transparency where we can read the loneliness and frustration in Francis’s
face, but all such emotions are loudly steamrolled by a combination of cheerful
declamation, interior monologue and retroactive narration that drown out,
sometimes literally, the unwelcome intrusions of reality.

However it is this very refusal to
see himself as a victim, taken to pathological extremes, that makes Francis
something of an admirable rebel (and perhaps explains the films
disproportionate popularity in Ireland, where it tops viewer polls) who spits
at authority, propriety and conservative ideals, adopting the exonym ‘pig’ with
defiant pride. Patrick McCabe, author of the source novel and screenplay
adaptions, offers up a simultaneously dead serious and tongue-in-cheek
checklist of ‘causes’ for Francie (poverty, alcoholism, a broken home, sexual
abuse, a violence-saturated pop culture, a class inferiority complex, Catholic
guilt, colonial baggage, nuclear paranoia and a genetic predisposition for
mental illness), but Francie isn’t interested in being a consequence of societal problems, he’d rather be the problem. It’s
more fun. And recognizing that sick truth is one reason why The Butcher Boy is
so funny and freeing, even while it never stops being, even for a moment,
incredibly disturbing.